I've covered retail and franchising a long while...so I never buy off end-caps. I've written for Entrepreneur, the Seattle Times, Seattle Business, Seattle Magazine, Alaska Airlines, Horizon Airlines, Puget Sound Business Journal, Nation's Restaurant News, Costco, and many more. In my free time, I mentor other freelance writers through my Make a Living Writing blog and my membership community, Freelance Writers Den. I live in the great Northwest with my husband, three kids, and assorted friends and pets. For a quick look at all the places I blog, see my Google+ profile: https://plus.google.com/+CarolTice

5 Ways To Get Cheap Labor Without Outsourcing Overseas

It’s a sign of success in any startup: You reach the point where you can’t do it all yourself. You’ve got to get some help.

This is the point at which many entrepreneurs turn to hiring platforms such as oDesk or Amazon Mechanical Turk and find someone in India, the Philippines, or elsewhere in the Third World and hire them at a fraction of the U.S. minimum wage.

Maybe you’ve heard the horror stories on how this often plays out. The miscommunications due to language differences, contractors who disappear and never turn in their work, the poorly executed projects that have to be done all over again by someone else. Outsourcing to someone far away might save you money — or it can turn out to waste precious time and resources. After all, how committed to your company can a contractor be who’s never met or spoken to you?

Whatever your reason for looking for outsource alternatives, the good news is there are many other ways to get cheap help. Here are a few alternatives to consider:

Hire students. If you need tech or design help or manual labor of any kind, look to the youth. High school and college business and entrepreneurship programs are full of smart, savvy students who need internships and projects to work on for course credit. Community colleges have trade-tech students who are itching to get experience in their field. When I started my freelance writing business in 2005, for instance, I hired a high school digital design student who put up and maintained my website for the first 18 months. He did a great job for a song.

Hire family. There are tax advantages to hiring family members that can make the net payout lower than you might think. At one point, I had my teen doing some of my website administration for my blog-based business, which got some scut work done I didn’t have time for and also taught him some good work habits. Multiple benefits here.

Barter or use time banks. Once when I found a designer whose style I liked, I wrote their website copy to get some graphics for my website. If you have valuable products or services and can find a good match with a provider who has a need for your services, consider a straight trade out. If you do consulting, consider joining a time bank for more flexibility. In this setup, you might get services from one time bank member, while that member uses yet a third member’s services to get what they need. You don’t need to trade directly.

Hire a special person. Federal tax breaks and hiring incentives come and go for hiring specific groups with high unemployment. Check current rules to see how you might benefit by hiring veterans, the disabled, the recently laid-off or other worker types.

Hire local U.S. freelancers. There are plenty of creatives out of work still, and you may be surprised at the affordable rates you can get for project work from highly experienced freelance designers, photographers, coders, and writers. There are also plenty of newbies in these fields who need portfolio work to get the sample and a testimonial. And you’ll have the advantage of working with people you can have come in for a meeting — or who you can buttonhole in person if you don’t like their performance.

These methods may not work for every type of job you need done, but a little creativity can get you some great local help at affordable rates. You may not be able to solve the entire U.S. unemployment problem single-handedly, but every little bit helps.

How do you get the work done affordably? Leave a comment and share your strategy.

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